Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

by Eduardo Galeano

Our youth multiplies, rises, listens: what does the voice of the system offer? The system speaks a surrealist language. In lands that are empty it proposes to avoid births; in countries where capital is plentiful but wasted it suggests that capital is lacking; it describes as “aid” the deforming orthopedics of loans and the draining of wealth that results from foreign investment; it calls upon big landowners to carry out agrarian reforms and upon the oligarchy to practice social justice. The class struggle only exists, we are told, because foreign agents stir it up; but social classes do exist and the oppression of one by the other is known as the Western way of life. The Marines undertake their criminal expeditions only to restore order and social peace; the dictatorships linked to Washington lay foundations in their jails for the law-abiding state, and ban strikes and smash trade unions to protect the freedom to work.

The metals taken from the new colonial dominions not only stimulated Europe’s economic development; one may say that they made it possible.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, French minister of marine under Louis XIV, wrote, “The more business a state does with the Spaniards, the more silver it has.” There was a sharp European struggle for the Spanish trade, which brought with it the market and the silver of Latin America. A late-seventeenth-century French document tells us that Spain controlled only 5 percent of the trade with “its” overseas colonial possessions, despite the juridical mirage of its monopoly: almost a third of the total was in Dutch and Flemish hands, a quarter belonged to the French, the Genoese controlled over one-fifth, the English one-tenth, and the Germans somewhat less. Latin America was a European business.

Defense of the Catholic faith turned out to be a mask for the struggle against history. The expulsion of the Jews in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella had deprived Spain of many able artisans and of indispensable capital. The expulsion of the Arabs in 1609 is considered less important, although no fewer than 275,000 Moors were put over the border, disastrously effecting the economy of Valencia and ruining the fertile Aragonese lands south of the Ebro. Previously, Philip II had thrown out thousands of Flemish artisans guilty or suspected of Protestantism. England welcomed them and they made a solid contribution to that country’s manufactures.

The Spanish colonies’ economic structure was born subordinated to the external market and was thus centralized around the export sector, where profit and power were concentrated.

the chief aim of those Spaniards who received Latin American mines, lands, and Indians from the king was to extract a surplus to send to Europe.16 This observation helps explain the ultimate goal of the Latin American colonial economy from its inception: although it showed some feudal characteristics, it functioned at the service of capitalism developing elsewhere.

The Indians of the Americas totaled no less than 70 million when the foreign conquerors appeared on the horizon; a century and a half later they had been reduced to 3.5 million. In 1685 only 4,000 Indian families remained of the more than 2 million that had once lived between Lima and Paita, according to the Marquis of Barinas.

In three centuries Potosí’s Cerro Rico consumed 8 million lives.

When Bartolomé de las Casas upset the Spanish Court with his heated denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Las Casas dedicated his zealous life to defending the Indians against the excesses of the mine owners and encomenderos. He once remarked that the Indians preferred to go to hell to avoid meeting Christians.

The massacres of Indians that began with Columbus never stopped. In Uruguay and Argentine Patagonia they were exterminated during the last century by troops that hunted them down and penned them in forests or in the desert so that they might not disturb the organized advance of cattle latifundia.* The Yaqui Indians of the Mexican state of Sonora were drowned in blood so that their lands, fertile and rich in minerals, could be sold without any unpleasantness to various U.S. capitalists.

During Holy Week, processions of the heirs of the Mayas produce frightful exhibitions of collective masochism. They drag heavy crosses and participate in the flagellation of Jesus step by step along the interminable ascent to Golgotha; with howls of pain they turn His death and His burial into the cult of their own death and their own burial, the annihilation of the beautiful life of long ago. Only there is no Resurrection at the end of their Holy Week.

The more a product is desired by the world market, the greater the misery it brings to the Latin American peoples whose sacrifice creates it.

“those who are responsible for murder by undernourishment are not locked inside, since they are the keepers of the keys.”

“The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country, and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one.”

Puerto Rico, another sugar factory, remained a prisoner. From the U.S. standpoint, Puerto Ricans are not good enough to live in a country of their own but are good enough to die in Vietnam for a country which is not theirs. In proportion to population, the “Free Associated State” of Puerto Rico has more soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia than the rest of the United States. Puerto Ricans resisting compulsory military service in Vietnam are sent to U.S. penitentiaries.

one must bear in mind that in a socialist society, unlike in a capitalist one, workers are not motivated by fear of unemployment or by avarice. Other drives—solidarity, collective responsibility, awareness of the duties and rights that move a man beyond selfishness—must be brought into play.

“The story of a grain of sugar is a whole lesson in political economy, in politics, and also in morality.”

With capital obtained from this trade in slaves, the Brown brothers of Providence installed the foundry that provided George Washington with guns for the American Revolution.

sharpened their pencils and totted up their accounts: subsistence wages worked out cheaper than the purchase and maintenance of increasingly scarce slaves. With the abolition of slavery in 1888, the combined forms of feudal serfdom and wage labor that still persist were inaugurated. From then on an army of “free” farmhands would accompany coffee on its travels.

only 5 percent of the price yielded by coffee in its journey from tree to U.S. consumer goes into the wages of the workers who produce it.

in a system of free competition some are freer than others.

In 1845 the United States had annexed the Mexican territories of Texas and California, where it restored slavery in the name of civilization. Mexico also lost the present states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah—more than half the country. The stolen territory was equal in size to present-day Argentina. “Poor Mexico!” it has been said ever since, “so far from God and so close to the United States!”

These two opposite systems of internal colonization reveal one of the most important differences between U.S. and Latin American development models. Why is the north rich and the south poor? The Rio Grande is much more than a geographical frontier. Is today’s profound disequilibrium, which seems to confirm Hegel’s prophecy of inevitable war between the two Americas, to be traced to U.S. imperialist expansion, or does it have more ancient roots? In fact, back in the colonial beginnings, north and south had already generated very different societies with different aims.* The Mayflower pilgrims did not cross the sea to obtain legendary treasures; they came mainly to establish themselves with their families and to reproduce in the New World the system of life and work they had practiced in Europe. They were not soldiers of fortune but pioneers; they came not to conquer but to colonize, and their colonies were settlements. It is true that a slave-plantation economy like Latin America’s developed later south of the Delaware, but there was a difference: the center of gravity in the United States was from the outset the farms and workshops of New England, from which came the victorious armies of the Civil War. New England colonists, the original nucleus of U.S. civilization, never acted as colonial agents for European capitalist accumulation; their own development, and the development of their new land, were always their motivation. The thirteen colonies served as an outlet for th...

This growing dependence on foreign supplies produces the growing identification of the interests of U.S. capitalists operating in Latin America with U.S. national security. The internal stability of the world’s greatest power is closely linked with its investments south of the Río Grande.

par for the course in Latin America: its resources are always surrendered to imperialism in the name of its lack of resources.

The United States pays less for Brazilian and Venezuelan iron than for iron from its own subsoil.

Since both firms sell the iron ore to their own steel mills in the United States, they have no interest in defending prices; on the contrary, it suits them that the raw material should be as cheap as possible. The world price of iron, which fell sharply between 1958 and 1964, has been relatively stable since and remains so; meanwhile, the price of steel has continued to rise. Steel is produced in the world’s wealthy centers, iron in the poor suburbs; steel pays “labor aristocracy” wages, iron mere subsistence wages.

By 1952 Brazil had agreed, in a military pact with the United States, not to sell raw materials of strategic value—such as iron—to any socialist country.

On August 21, 1961, President Jânio Quadros signed a bill annulling the illegal rights extended to Hanna and restoring Minas Gerais iron to the national reserve. Four days later the armed forces made Quadros resign: “Terrible forces have risen against me,” said the text of his resignation.

Standard Oil and Shell seat and unseat kings and presidents, finance palace plots and coups d’état, have innumerable generals, ministers, and James Bonds at their command, and make decisions about peace or war in every field and every language. Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) is the capitalist world’s biggest industrial enterprise; outside the United States no industrial enterprise has greater power than Royal Dutch/Shell. Affiliates sell crude petroleum to subsidiaries which refine it and sell it to branch organizations for distribution: there is no loss of blood in the whole internal circulatory system of the cartel, which also owns the pipelines and most of the oil fleets on the seven seas. Prices are manipulated on a world scale to keep taxes low and profits high: the crude petroleum gets constantly cheaper, the refined constantly more expensive.

When most of the crude petroleum sold by the oil companies came from U.S. wells, the price was kept up; but when, during World War II, the United States became a net importer and the cartel began applying a new policy, the price systematically sagged. An odd inversion of the “laws of the market”:

In January 1960, President Eisenhower cut the Cuban sugar quota, and in February Fidel Castro signed a trade agreement with the USSR to exchange sugar for petroleum and other products at prices beneficial to Cuba. Standard Oil of New Jersey, Shell, and Texaco refused to refine Soviet petroleum, and in July the Cuban government nationalized them without compensation. The corporations, headed by Standard Oil, began a blockade, first boycotting qualified personnel, then machinery replacement parts, then transportation. The conflict was a test of sovereignty and Cuba emerged with flying colors. It simultaneously stopped being a star in the U.S. flag and a cog in the worldwide Standard Oil machine.

Petroleum has not only sparked coups d’état in Latin America: it also set off a war—the Chaco War of 1932-1935—between South America’s two poorest peoples. René Zavaleta called the mutual massacre of Bolivians and Paraguayans “the war of the naked soldiers.”21 Louisiana Senator Huey Long shook the United States on May 30, 1934, with a violent speech accusing Standard Oil of New Jersey of provoking the conflict and of financing the Bolivian army so that it would appropriate the Paraguayan Chaco on its behalf.

Almost half the profits U.S. capitalists take from Latin America come from Venezuela. One of the world’s richest countries, it is also one of the poorest and most violent. It boasts of Latin America’s highest per-capita income and most complete and up-to-date highway network, and no country consumes as much Scotch whiskey per inhabitant. Immediately exploitable iron, petroleum, and gas reserves in its subsoil could multiply by ten the wealth of every Venezuelan; the population of Germany or England could fit into its enormous virgin lands.

The woes of the Paraguayans stem from a war of extermination which was the most infamous chapter in South American history: the War of the Triple Alliance, they called it. Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay joined in committing genocide. They left no stone unturned, nor male inhabitants amid the ruins. Although Britain took no direct part in the ghastly deed, it was in the pockets of British merchants, bankers, and industrialists that the loot ended up. The invasion was financed from start to finish by the Bank of London, Baring Brothers, and the Rothschild bank, in loans at exorbitant interest rates which mortgaged the fate of the victorious countries. Until its destruction, Paraguay stood out as a Latin American exception—the only country that foreign capital had not deformed. The long, iron-fisted dictatorship of Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1814-1840) had incubated an autonomous, sustained development process in the womb of isolation. The all-powerful paternalist state filled the place of a nonexistent national bourgeoisie in organizing the nation and orienting its resources and its destiny. Francia had used the peasant masses to crush the Paraguayan oligarchy, and had established internal peace by erecting a cordon sanitaire between Paraguay and the other countries of the old La Plata viceroyalty. Expropriations, exilings, jails, persecutions, and fines had been used—not to consolidate the internal power of landlords and merchants, but for their destruction. Political lib...

The tracks were laid not to connect internal areas one with another, but to connect production centers with ports. The design still resembles the fingers of an open hand: thus railroads, so often hailed as forerunners of progress, were an impediment to the formation and development of an internal market.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank emerged together to deny to underdeveloped countries the right of protecting their national industries, and to discourage state action in those countries. Infallible curative properties were attributed to private enterprise. But the United States did not abandon an economic policy which still remains rigidly protectionist, and which listens carefully to the voice of history: in the North the disease was never confused with the remedy.

In the rigid framework of a global capitalism integrated around the big U.S. corporations, the industrialization of Latin America has increasingly less to do with progress and national liberation. The talisman was robbed of its power in the decisive defeats of the past century, when ports triumphed over interiors and free trade crushed new-born national industries. And the twentieth century produced no bourgeoisie strong and creative enough to reshoulder the task and follow it through to its end. Every effort petered out halfway to the goal. What happened to Latin America’s industrial bourgeoisie was what happens to dwarfs: it became decrepit without having grown. Our bourgeois of today are agents and functionaries of prepotent foreign corporations. Truth compels us to admit that they never did anything to deserve a better fate.

Law 56,570, passed on July 6, 1965, reserved the petrochemical industry for the state; Law 56,571, passed the same day, annulled Law 56,570, opening up petrochemicals to private investment.

The United States, which itself operates an enormous protectionist system—tariffs, quotas, internal subsidies—has never earned a glance from the IMF. Toward Latin America, on the other hand, the IMF is inflexible: for this it was brought into the world.

imperialism imports capital from the countries it operates in.